EVE General Discussion

Hi all eve players,

I am currently trying to get a spot on my local UNI in the game architecture and design department.
In order to get higher on the list of applicants I am expected to make some assignments and I would like YOUR help.

One of the assignments is picking one of the game mechanics of your game of choice and write a short essay on that subject, however, I am unsure what exactly is a game mechanic.

Is crime-watch as a whole for example a single mechanic? Are stargates a single mechanic?
It seems to me that some mechanics might "flow" in to each making it hard to really distinguish them from each other?

It would also be nice if you could mention your own favourite game mechanic and give a short explanation why

Thanks you for making it this far,



( Do not hesitate to point out any of my English failures, because I want to improve on that too.
P.s. Is this the right forum for this?


TL:DR : What is a game mechanic, what is your favourite game mechanic in ANY game.

In before Sov Grind mention.

O man, all that knowledge

Write an essay on the influence of players behavior in regards to the local mechanic. I would be happy to grade it for you.

Market dynamics -- including how hubs form -- would probably be an excellent way to discuss emergent gameplay with an open economy.

[CTRL]-[Q]uest gives you a secret Quest. Try it!

Grid-fu

This.

You're taking game design at the university level, and nobody has explained to you the term "game mechanics"?

No offense, but maybe you should look for a university with a proper game design department?

Anyway, a game mechanic, as the name implies, is any mechanism (rule in the software) that defines or restricts what you can do within the game. In EVE, there are loads and loads of mechanics that define what we can do, but most of them are designed in a very natural manner, in such a way as to give the game that coveted "sandbox" feeling.

For example, a game mechanic in EVE is the "warp to" mechanic. You select a destination, which can be almost anything that shows up on your overview, and you select "warp to". The game then puts your ship into a "warping" state, and points your ship towards the object, increases your speed GREATLY, and then decreases your speed back to zero when you're close to that object.

What I like about this mechanic in EVE is that although warping is in practice very necessary to get from one place to the other, it isn't required, and the mechanism doesn't do anything special to your ship beyond flagging it as "in warp", which prevents you from using certain modules, and also prevents you from adjusting your speed and heading manually. That's the brilliant part. If you want, you can fly normally from one place to another, there's no artificial barrier preventing you from travelling between A and B in a system on your sub-warp engines, it just takes a long time.

A good, solid example of this is the two stations orbiting the fourth moon of the fourth planet in the Jita solar system. The two stations are located about 1 000KM away from each other, so with a fast ship like a frigate you can actually fly from one station to the other in a couple of minutes, and the game allows you to do that.

To contrast with this, take for example jumping (for instance through a stargate). This is a different game mechanic that serves a similar purpose to warping. Jumping takes your ship object and removes it from the game environment, then triggers an unloading and loading sequence where the solar system you're in is dumped off your screen, your ship is placed into another game environment (the destination system), and your screen is fed the background and objects of your new location before you regain control.

Unlike warping, this game mechanic does something drastic to your state within the game. It changes your game state, including the number that describes which solar system you're in, and your local coordinates within that solar system. Also unlike warping, there is no alternative to jumping. You have to change your game session to get from one solar system to the next, and there simply is no other way to do it.

This leads to some interesting quirks in the game engine. When these two game mechanics start interacting with each other, or more precisely don't interact with each other, an interesting thing happens:

Once upon a time, there was a team of intrepid young adventurers. They were playing around with their warp drives, testing the limits and boundaries of the game mechanics, and they found a way to warp farther than the celestial objects in the solar system. This lead to them warping many many astronomical units away from the star and planets in the solar system, and after a while they had gotten so far that they could visibly see their "you are here" marker on the star map having moved away from the dot that indicates the solar system. Indeed, they managed to warp so far that they were located on top of a different solar system dot. But because they had not changed session by using a stargate or other jumping device, they were still within the game environment of the original solar system they had departed from.

If I come across the original post that these guys made, I'll make sure to edit in a link. But at the moment I'm still looking.

Edit: I've found a copy of the video they made about this story. Not only does it show off some really cool mechanisms that CCP later "fixed" by changing certain game mechanics, but it also shows off the (rather nostalgic for some of us) rustic, janky look of EVE pre-Trinity.

A Deep Space Odyssey - EVE Online (Youtube)

Yep that would be my answer too. Eve's market is incredible.

The politics formed in 0.0 is interesting too, but I don't know if you actually class that as a mechanic, or emergent gameplay...